The coupling of an optical microscope to an image sensor and a computer system is existing art. This applies to the coupling of microscopes to CCD camera systems, video camera systems, and scanning microscopes (confocal, multi-photon, 4-pi). What is critical in these systems according to the existing art is the fact that the image sensor and computer system are coupled via a communication medium. Both the image sensor and the communication medium have a memorizing property that as a rule is expressed explicitly as a memory. This is explicitly the case in CCD cameras, where the CCD chip itself is constructed as a memory organized in rows and/or columns and, in the case of scanning microscopes, is integrated as RAM into the scanning electronics. In the context of the periodic recording of data (image frames), this can result in unnecessary filling of the memory with more or less redundant data; this has a limiting effect if the processing terminal cannot process that quantity of data quickly enough. This limitation is present in the existing art and is even more bothersome if little or nothing is happening in the scene or specimen being observed.